Ride the Lightning (7): Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
by jtm1848
Summary: A most AU finish to the Xindi story arc.


– WELCOME HOME

(SANITARIUM) –

The intercom was down throughout the _Enterprise._

Not content to sit on the bridge reading computerized status reports, Captain Archer departed for main engineering at a run, sliding down vertical access chutes and hurtling through debris-strewn corridors with Ensign Mayweather sharp on his heels. The engineering compartment was three decks down and scant meters to the port, but the lifts were offline—and in a design anomaly that Archer never understood, there was not a direct lift connection between the two critical areas of the ship.

As the two officers dashed through the battle-strewn wreckage, Archer calmly, subconsciously, noted it in his head: ruptured bulkheads, blown power conduits, sparking EPS taps, dangling circuitry, and everywhere, thick smoke cloaking the depth of the damage sustained by the once-great starship. Much of it was beyond repair, Archer knew; when—if—the _Enterprise_limped its way home, the vessel that had carried them for so far would be worth little more than scrap, consigned to an ignominious end in a junk dealer's back lot.

Running down the length of the exterior hallway, Archer punched through the main doorway with a lowered shoulder, and was greeted with a scene worthy of Dante's Inferno.

Main engineering was on fire.

The compartment glowed with the hellish light of Hades, punctuated with the sharp red flashes of myriad alarms resounding simultaneously. Flames leapt upward from the primary consoles. Bolts of crackling, green energy spit between fractured injectors, and the induction coils burned with a brightness that temporarily paralyzed a human eye. Thick smoke billowed overhead, obliterating the raised ceiling, and down the length of the reactor, the coolant conduits vented steaming gas, the harsh hiss unheard over the cacophony.

Around Archer, the engineering crew worked with grim determination to save what was left. They fought the fires with handheld suppressant units, spraying down the burning plasma with dousing chemicals, making little headway against the superannuated flames consuming the all-important engineering equipment. Other crewmembers dashed about, rerouting critical systems into overloaded circuits, trying to deny the fires the fuel needed to sustain the deadly reactions. More than one crewmember, the captain saw, was hunched over, hacking madly to clear their lungs of the viscous smoke, and several lay on the deck, writhing in horrified pain. A couple didn't move at all, and Archer's nose wrinkled involuntarily at the stench of burning flesh.

Archer forced himself to mentally screen out the chaos, and he surveyed the room again with the coolness of a trained Starfleet officer, assessing the wounds suffered by the _Enterprise. _There was little hope left, he realized; it would be a miracle if the crew could hold the ship together even until the end of the day. The death blow could come from any of a dozen sources; venting antimatter, overheating the warp reactor, catastrophic failure of the manifolds…

Trip Tucker chose that moment to emerge through the protected hatchway to the deuterium injector room, off to the starboard side of the engineering bay. He was barking orders to his repair teams, periodically blasting a smoldering ruin with chemical suppressants, until his hyper-alert senses noticed the captain standing in the entryway.

"Cap'n!" Trip shouted, jogging across the bay. As the young officer pulled up close, Archer realized that his chief engineer deserved to be in sickbay; along with the multiple cuts and bruises, many still dripping blood, Trip's left arm was strapped to his body in a make-shift sling, and the right side of his face appeared deformed, as though wrinkled by the potent radiation unleashed by the unshielded warp reactor.

Trip ran a hand through his hair, and Archer couldn't help but notice that several clumps came out. "It doesn't look good, sir," Trip reported. The right side of his mouth drooped, giving his words a strange accent. "The warp core's completely gone. We're going to have to start jettisoning components soon."

"Is there any chance of getting the engines back online?" Archer asked, even as his hopes crashed. Without the warp engines…they would never return to Earth, much less catch up with the weapon.

Trip shook his head. "I guess it didn't register on the bridge, sir…one of the shots completely severed the port nacelle. It's gone, Captain. The only thing the core's good for now is to slowly kill us—unless it goes critical first." He didn't even flinch as another coolant conduit blew, spewing engineering with a burning mist of gases.

"What about the impulse drive? Maneuvering thrusters?"

Tucker sighed. "We can't even _get _to the primary impulse rockets." The four primary rockets were located on the rear struts, near the junctions of the nacelle pylons. They could only be reached by means of wrecked corridors. "I can send a couple people down to clear the way. If the fuel tanks haven't been ruptured, we might have a chance at getting them back online. But that won't do us much good."

"The ship's unbalanced," Travis added, spelling out the problem for Archer. "The structural integrity field has to remain balanced in order to function at _any _speed. It has a wide tolerance, but it can't compensate for losing an entire nacelle."

Archer thought for a moment. "So what if we cut loose the other nacelle?"

Trip stared at the captain in disbelief, leaving Travis to answer the question. "Theoretically…it would rebalance the field," he replied thoughtfully. "But the nacelle isn't designed to come off."

"Obviously, it can," Archer countered wryly. "What do you think, Trip?"

"I don't like it." Tucker frowned. "We could send an EV crew out to cut the stem bolt rivets. It would take a few hours, but I think we could do it. The bigger problem is interior—with all the damage to the warp core, severing the other nacelle could finish it off."

"The warp plasma accelerators have an emergency exhaust shunt at the third stage," Travis noted. "We'd likely have to physically open it, but if we can open the shunt, and then close the accelerator before the plasma reaches the pylon—"

"Yeah, I see where you're going, Travis." Trip weighed it for a moment. "We'd be venting raw warp plasma out the rear the ship, but as long as we keep moving fast enough, we should be able to avoid any damage from it."

"How long?" Archer asked, interrupting the theorizing.

"It'll take us a couple hours to even figure out if we _can_," Trip replied. "I'll have to pull people from other tasks."

"Do it," Archer ordered firmly. The long-term survival of the _Enterprise_was irrelevant. "Travis, stay down here and do what you can to help."

"Aye, sir," Mayweather answered.

As Archer turned and left engineering, he could here the two men talking. "Travis, why don't you check out the impulse rockets down on E-deck? You better take a repair team with you."

…

By the time Archer returned to the bridge, Jannar and Depac had already boarded the _Enterprise_, and the captain found the two Xindi in the rear alcove. Unsurprisingly, the bridge stations were unmanned; with little activity, the skeleton staff clustered into the situation room to take part discussing plans with T'Pol and the Xindi representatives.

The captain trotted down into the recessed room. "How long before the weapon reaches Earth?" he asked abruptly, yanking attention to his presence.

"Approximately five hours," Jannar answered. "The subspace corridor is fast, but it has a large distance to cover."

"Do we have any ships that could reach it in time?" Archer queried next. It was not a routine question; most of the ships in their ad-libbed fleet had sustained serious damage. Some, like the _Enterprise, _were dead in space; some had been reduced to space dust, while others existed in varied states of death and destruction.

"Degra's shuttle is the only vessel still intact," Jannar replied. "It is fast—it could conceivably catch up with the weapon, but we can't be certain of just when. It may catch up inside the corridor, or possibly not until the weapon has already entered your home system."

"It would be of little use, although," Depac added morosely. "The ship has no weapons. It would be of little use. Dolim's fleet would simply destroy it."

"Yeah, but there would still be a gap of time," Ensign Rahimi countered, growing visibly excited. "If we had even a minute—"

"That would be sufficient time to transport a boarding party onto the weapon," T'Pol said. "Assuming everything goes right."

Depac stared at the humans. "And what would that accomplish for you? The reptilians will have soldiers stationed aboard the weapon. Your boarding party will be far outnumbered."

"It'll still give us a fighting chance," Archer stated firmly. "And any chance is worth taking."

Depac shook his head in amazement. _These humans just don't know when to give up._ "Very well, Captain," the primate acknowledged. "I'll detach Degra's shuttle for your use. I don't suppose I'll be getting it back."

"There's one more thing," Jannar said, interrupting. "The aquatics joined us only because you claimed to know how to destroy the spheres. They're still waiting for you to fulfill that promise."

Archer raised an eyebrow at T'Pol. "That's your field, Commander."

"We completed our study shortly before the battle," T'Pol answered primly. "The plan is ready for transmission."

"It _will _be successful?" Jannar posed cautiously.

"Yes," T'Pol answered. "If you execute it as written, it should disrupt the entire network. Once the network is down, you can destroy the individual spheres at your leisure."

"Very well. Take care of it, T'Pol. I have another task to attend to. Sorenson, try to get intercom back online." Archer closed out the conversation and, circumnavigating A-deck, darted back to the vertical access chute.

…

F-deck was primarily devoted to ship defenses: it contained all six torpedo tubes (four fore, two aft), torpedo launch bays and magazines, the primary weapons locker, and combat training facilities. Unsurprisingly, when the _Enterprise_departed Earth many months earlier, the MACO detachment had made the latter rooms their second home, where they trained and honed their skills to within razor-thin precision. It was here that Malcolm Reed found the remnants of the platoon, following a rapid, whispered conversation with Captain Archer.

Originally, the commandos had numbered thirty-six, but through combat attrition and injuries suffered from being inside an imploding vessel, their force had dropped to twenty-three combat-capable members. But when the lieutenant entered, all twenty-three snapped to attention, ready—and hoping—that his words would include the phrase "boarding party."

Calmly, Malcolm inspected the commandos with a trained eye, designed not so much to genuinely inspect their readiness as to communicate a sense of confidence and readiness. He liked what he saw; he nodded approvingly, giving several grunts of satisfaction as he paced down the line. He had seen _cleaner _troops, yes; that was no surprise, given the condition of the _Enterprise._ But he had rarely seen such steel determination, such persistence and tenacity.

Completing his inspection, Malcolm stepped out in front of the assembled commandos. "At ease," he ordered, and not a single commando softened their stance. Malcolm had to crush an inward smile.

"If you haven't heard," he said soberly, "Major Hayes' boarding party did not return to the _Enterprise. _Their transponder signals were all terminated, which means they're likely dead." He pursed his lips tightly. "I'm sorry.

"But this is not the time to dwell on loss," he continued firmly. "We've got less than five hours before that damned weapon reaches Earth. The captain has a plan for stopping it. I won't lie; we don't have much chance of success. But anything—_anything_—is worth the effort."

He started to slowly pace down the length of the line. "Degra's shuttle is the only ship capable of catching up with the weapon, but it is also unarmed. Therefore—" Malcolm's eyes sent out piercing rays of intensity. "Therefore, our best hope is to use the shuttle to land a boarding party on the weapon. We'll be relying on the shuttle's speed to get us in before the vessel is destroyed." Several grim nods acknowledged the plan.

"But that's not our problem," Malcolm went on. "We don't know what to expect once we're in. We don't know how many guards we'll find, or how many security systems there are. This will require the absolute best of every one of you: this is _not _just a firefight. We have to adjust, adapt on the run. Our mission is to get the captain to the inner core of the weapon. His survival is paramount."

Malcolm stopped his pacing. "I don't imagine the reptilians will make this easy for us, but MACOs aren't here for the easy missions." A couple appreciative chuckles answered. "Major Hayes handpicked every one of you for this mission, because he knew you'd get the job done. And it's time to do that job."

Malcolm let the room fall silent, and in the stillness, one of the commandos—Corporal McKenzie, he recognized—stepped forward. "With all due respect, sir," she said firmly, "we don't need a pep talk. Just point us in the right direction."

"Very well." Malcolm couldn't help but smile. It would be a privilege leading these men and women into battle. "Assemble your gear, and report to the starboard airlock in ten minutes."

…

His last task finished, Captain Archer kept moving, trotting down the starboard corridor of E-deck towards the airlock. The hallway itself was in a semi-wrecked state, but by now, Archer was well-accustomed to navigating through the demolished remains of the _Enterprise,_ and the collection of jumps, hurdles, ducks, and other maneuvers came unconsciously. He didn't even flinch as he jogged through the mess hall to avoid a cluster of jury-rigged support beams and bulkhead paneling.

Breathing heavily, Archer finally came to a stop in the airlock lobby, where Malcolm waited for him in the dim lighting. "We're all set, sir," Malcolm reported, his words hurried. "All the MACOs are on board Degra's shuttle with their equipment. We're a go, whenever you give the order."

"Well done, Malcolm," Archer replied, using the moment to snare a breath. "Get on board, I'll join you in just—"

"Captain!" Another voice shouted around the cut of the corridor. Malcolm merely nodded, and entered the airlock as the thin form of the _Enterprise_'s sole Vulcan appeared in the shadows. "Captain!" T'Pol repeated.

_This is a surprise, _Archer thought. Coming to see them off—it was such a sentimental gesture, a downright _emotional _gesture. _But also a worthwhile one,_ he added soberly.

"Commander, can you make sure that Trip and Travis know what's up?" he asked. In Archer's hasty dashes about the ship, he hadn't been able to return to either of his senior officers to notify them of his impending absence. "When you get those engines online, I expect you to be in the corridor—and I mean it. No dallying to run checks, no waiting to bring other systems on line. When those impulse rockets fire, get the _Enterprise_'s ass in the corridor." _When? If_, Archer added mentally._ That's one helluva BIG if._

"Of course, Captain," T'Pol replied, acknowledging the orders. She started to move, and then stopped, as if hesitant.

Archer couldn't help but notice. "What is it, T'Pol?"

"Jonathan," she replied softly, catching the captain by surprise. T'Pol rarely—if ever—addressed him by his familiar name. "I believe the appropriate salutation is, 'Godspeed'." She glanced down as she said it.

Archer smiled warmly, and he reached out to pat the suffering Vulcan on the shoulder. "Listen, T'Pol, can you do me a favor?" he asked. She nodded, her eyes glistening. "When this is all over, if the _Enterprise_survives…" There's that _if _again, he thought silently. "Can you make sure Porthos has a good home?"

It brought a quirk of a smile to T'Pol's face. "Of course, Captain," she acknowledged.

"I gotta get going, T'Pol," Archer added, looking back into the dark airlock. "I'll see you at the rendezvous afterwards."

…

In the middle of the subspace corridor, flying down its length towards the Terran system, was a fleet of a perfect dozen ships, escorting the great spherical weapon towards its destination. Of little surprise, eleven of the escorts were reptilian; the insectoids had not known the Xindi split was coming, and thus were unable to shift more vessels into place rapidly enough. But one insectoid craft was present, flying in tandem with its reptilian brethren, commanded by the insectoid's representative to the now-defunct Xindi council. And has befitted his kind, the insect was suspicious.

"The insectoids are hailing us," Dolim's communications technician growled, spouting out the words as if they polluted his mouth. The youthful reptile had been handpicked by Dolim and trained under the commander's watchful eye; he was the paragon of the Xindi future, Dolim believed. The future when the reptilians commanded the Xindi with a firm hand and a cold heart.

"Put it on screen," Dolim ordered with a baleful gesture, and the multiplexed head of the insect appeared a moment later.

_*The anomalies worked to our advantage,*_ the insect chirped.

"Yes, they did," Dolim grunted. "We were fortunate."

_*Fortune?*_ The insect chittered furiously. _*To accomplish the precise timing…the precise location…that was no fortune. Someone controlled those anomalies.*_

"And what of it?" Dolim replied. His patience was running short. "We'll worry about it tomorrow. _After _the humans are exterminated."

_*But what about the human's claim that the Guardians control the Spheres, and thus the anomalies?* _The insect's legs flickered frantically. _*These recent anomalies prove that the human may be right. And can we take the risk of destroying him BEFORE we ascertain his veracity?*_

"As you may recall," Dolim roared, "we offered the human a chance to make his case! And _you _were the first to reject it! Don't give in to the human's machinations now—he's already done enough damage to the Xindi Union!"

If an insect could look disbelieving, this one did. _*The human didn't kill Degra. YOU did. And without our agreement, I might add.*_

"Degra was a traitor! I simply did what no one else had the mettle to do!"

_*I am no longer certain that Degra was a traitor,* _the insect chirped. _*Those miraculous anomalies cast many doubts on what we were led to believe.*_

"Then it's a good thing that we have your access codes." His fury transmuted into hardened ire, Dolim gestured for the channel to be closed. "Lock weapons on their ship," he ordered.

"Sir?" the weapons technician queried. This officer had _not _been one of Dolim's handpicked.

"I won't take the chance of any more interference," Dolim snarled. "The insectoids have become a liability. Fire."

Beams of fire spat out from Dolim's ship, striking the insectoid craft at mid-beam. In scarcely a second, it imploded in a rapidly-disintegrating fireball.

_That's better, _Dolim thought, pleased with his actions. _No one will stand in our way._

…

_[The favorable timelines continue to diminish.]_

_[That is impossible. Events are proceeding in our favor.]_

_[I agree. The weapon has almost reached its target. No meaningful resistance remains.]_

_[Nonetheless, the odds seem to be slipping away. I cannot account for it, but the timelines do not lie.]_

_[Do the timelines place that much value on the humans' assault team? They'll be lucky even to catch up with the weapon!]_

_[Perhaps the dissonant variable is the humans' ship. They are working on repairing its star drive.]_

_[But even if they are successful, they have no weapons!]_

_[They are of no consequence. What can a single unarmed ship do against an entire fleet?]_

_[It is the most logical explanation.]_

_[Do these humans never give up?]_

…

Degra's shuttle may be small, but it was fast, Archer realized as he watched the readings scroll across a monitor. The small vessel shot forward, hot on the heels of the reptilian fleet.

"They currently have a three-hour lead on us," Thalen reported. "But this vessel is faster. We're closing the gap." Degra's long-time aide, Thalen had assumed command of the shuttle—and Degra's mission—upon the death of his mentor. The grief he carried was etched on his face, and when the moment arrived, he had willingly agreed to lead his ship and crew on this last-chance pursuit. He knew it was a mission of no return, but he had believed in Degra. When the scientist had told Thalen that this nascent alliance with humans would one day save their race, Thalen believed it, and he was willing to give his life for Degra's dream.

"Will it be fast enough?" Archer asked cautiously, not wanting to insult the primate's command. "Will we be able to catch the weapon before it exits the corridor?" The captain knew that Earth's space defenses were meager—if the weapon reached the Terran system unscathed…

"I don't believe so," Thalen admitted. "I can't be certain. It will be close."

Archer had steeled himself for the news, and it transmuted from a lightning bolt into a wave of cold energy.

"Fortunately, that part's not my concern," Malcolm admitted. His arms were folded across his chest, giving him the appearance of added mass. "What do we do when we catch up with them?"

"My officers are working on an insertion plan," Thalen answered, nodding to two other primates. They huddled over a monitor, talking softly. "At best, we anticipate a window of a minute and a half to get your team in." _Until my ship is destroyed, _he knew. _But we all must fulfill our duty._

"Assuming we get in, where do we go?" Archer asked. "We know very little about the interior schematics, and we have to move fast. Do we have any sensor scans of the weapon?"

Thalen looked at the human with surprise. "Degra designed the weapon himself, Captain," Thalen answered. "And this is his personal shuttle. Do you really think that we don't have the complete blueprints?"

Archer broke into a tight grin, thanking fortune for the twists of fate that were falling into place.

…

In the captain's absence, T'Pol, oddly enough, did not find herself in command of the _Enterprise_; by her own request, following several lapses stemming from her use of trellium, she had been removed from the slot of first officer. This meant that Commander Tucker was technically in command, and with Lieutenant Reed absent as well, Ensign Mayweather had received temporary status as the second.

All in all, it did little to ease the burden on T'Pol. Trip's entire attention was focused in main engineering, trying to repair enough of the battle damage to make the _Enterprise_space-worthy, and Travis wasn't even in the saucer section of the starship; he was back in the tail, trying to simultaneously install a plasma shunt and restore the impulse rockets to operational condition.

With her own project completed—the information packet describing how the Spheres functioned and how to destroy them had been hand-delivered to Depac and Jannar earlier—T'Pol found herself in the position of coordinating the emergency repairs. With the intercom system still flickering, this meant that T'Pol was running back and forth across the ship, personally checking each repair sector.

Entering main engineering, the small Vulcan deftly maneuvered around the scurrying crew. Seeking out the commander, she located him by the deuterium induction coils, trying to seal a microscopic breach. If such a breach had occurred in the _anti-deuterium _ coils, the ship would have been long gone.

"Report," she ordered—requested—as she strode up to Trip.

After barking out another order, the engineer turned to face T'Pol. He looked exhausted, and he was covered—head to foot, front to back—in thick grim. During the last couple hours, Trip had obtained some medical care, and the right side of his face was swathed in green-tinged bandages. He had ripped off the upper portion his coveralls to accommodate the excess heat lying stagnant in the engineering bay, leaving his dirt-and-sweat covered torso clad only in a sleeveless undershirt.

Trip ran his good, right hand through his hair, leaving it standing up straight. "We've realigned the main power grid," he said, taking a deep breath. "It won't blow apart in our faces, but we need to bleed off the pressure somewhere. I haven't heard from the EV team yet."

"How soon will we be ready to resume travel?" T'Pol asked, almost nonchalantly.

Trip glared at her. "Maybe I should explain this better. We're barely holding together, staying in one place. If we try to move, it'll disrupt the power grid again—and _kaboom!_" He gestured with one hand. "The ship will come apart at the seams."

"We have to get moving, Commander," T'Pol countered. "Can you have it ready to go in two hours?"

"I know the cap'n ordered us to get into the corridor," Trip scowled back, "but if we demolish the ship in the process, we won't do him much good!"

"We don't have a _choice, _Commander," T'Pol snapped. "If Captain Archer fails, then it's up to us—and we won't do much good stranded in the Expanse. Two hours, then I'm taking the ship in."

…

"Report!" T'Pol ordered as she reached the bridge, four decks above. With the lifts still out—and not a priority—she had to take the access chutes the entire way. Fortunately, Vulcan stamina was far superior to that of humans…but it was still a tough climb, given the volume of free-floating smoke that clogged the air.

The bridge was torn apart, but at least the debris had been cleared away, providing an open path to travel. It was scarcely populated; the primary repair efforts were taking place on the decks below, but the secondary bridge crew was present, more in preparation for the moment when the _Enterprise_was able to travel than anything else.

As she entered from the external corridor arching around the front of A-deck, T'Pol calmly noted the presence of each crewmember. Sorenson was hunched over the comm station with another technician, working on the intercom system. Rahimi was located towards the rear, down in the situation room; T'Pol's sensitive eyes could make out sensor scans on the monitors. Hutchinson's legs dangled from the ceiling.

"Commander! Back here!" Rahimi shouted out, summoning the Vulcan aft. As T'Pol trotted up, she recognized the sensor signatures of the blossoming anomaly outside. "I think we have a problem!"

"What is it?" T'Pol asked as she stopped. Given a few seconds, the science officer could likely discern the situation from the sensor readings; but she wanted the ensign's report as well.

"This isn't a normal anomaly, Commander," Rahimi reported. She switched to a gravimetric analysis. "See the readings here—here—and here?"

T'Pol nodded. "What is your analysis, Ensign?"

"The anomalies we've encountered before only drew on part of the Spheres' power," Rahimi replied. "We've known that; they had to distribute the power out over the entire network. But when the Builders' created _this _anomaly, they seemed to focus as much power as possible on these coordinates."

"Logical," T'Pol answered. "They wanted to ensure its success."

"But here's the problem—it's reconfiguring this local area much more quickly. Rather than simply disrupting the quantum constants, they're transforming them."

"The readings do bear substantial similarities to the disturbance where we found the trans-dimensional being," T'Pol observed. "This anomaly seems to be in an earlier stage, but it's progressing rapidly. Do you have an estimate on how long this area of space will remain habitable?"

"The crew has half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes," Rahimi answered. "If the _Enterprise_was in better shape, we'd be able to survive longer. The ship itself will last for several hours after that, but the anomaly will eat away at any organic tissue in the vicinity."

T'Pol looked at the readings closely. "It's possible that Dr. Phlox will be able to prolong our survival," she said, "but it will only gain us minutes…we must find a way to abbreviate our repair efforts. I'll stop by sickbay, then return to engineering. Please send these scans down to the medical computers, and then inform the Xindi vessels of your findings."

…

_There's a lesson in all this,_ Archer reflected as gigaquads of data scrolled across the computer monitor. _And it's this: it's useless to only kill the lead scientist, and leave his assistants alive_. The data had been encrypted, but Thalen knew the codes; and now, as the information came out, the Xindi-primate explained each portion of it to Archer and Malcolm.

"We won't be able to transport directly into the core," Malcolm observed as the data flew by. There were no transporter scattering fields in place; the technology was unknown to the Xindi (and the humans, for that matter), but the sheer depth and density of metals, alloys, and electromagnetic currents served a similar effect. "We'll have to beam in on the peripheral framework."

"That leaves you a long distance to travel," Thalen noted. "The official guard complement on board the weapon is small, but Commander Dolim may have detached additional units."

"We can deal with soldiers," Malcolm replied, confident in the abilities of the MACOs. "We just have to move fast enough. I'm more concerned about mechanical defenses."

"There are none," Thalen answered. He properly interpreted Malcolm's raised eyebrow. "Degra was concerned that any stray weapons fire would inadvertently damage the weapon itself."

_That increases our chances of success sevenfold,_ Archer realized. The thought was still grim: sevenfold zero was still extremely low. "Malcolm, I want your team to beam in a couple seconds before I do, and secure the beam-in site."

"Of course, sir," Malcolm replied. He knew that it was not a question of the captain's courage: rather, Archer would be carrying the explosives and detonators, and there was no reason to subject him to added danger.

"I'd suggest using this platform—here," Thalen added. He pointed to a relatively-clear location near the exterior of the weapon. "It's a minor area; there shouldn't be anyone standing guard, and you'll have a clear dash up this access conduit to the core."

"Sounds good," Archer replied, and he looked up at the primate. "As soon as we've beamed over, I want you warping out at full speed. You won't be able to do much else for us."

"You have no intention of getting out?" Thalen asked quietly.

Archer shook his head. "If we're successful in creating an overload, we physically won't have time to get back to the beam-in point." He left unsaid what would happen if they were not successful. "I'm not going to jeopardize your crew in a hopeless rescue attempt."

"Are all humans so comfortable with the notion of dying?" Thalen asked in wonder.

Archer snorted. "Don't mistake composure with comfort. I have no desire to die on that weapon, and if we somehow find a way off…I'll be very happy to take it. But our first priority is destroying that damned weapon."

…

When T'Pol reached sickbay, it was a zoo, and she realized with chagrin that her arrival coincided with the influx of post-battle triage casualties. Dr. Phlox and his technicians were dashing between the injured, some of whom—the unluckiest—were reclined on the biobeds; others stood in place, or sat, slouched, on the floor, gripping themselves tightly in pain as they waited for a medic to supply first-aid. Lying on the floor of Phlox's office was a pair of crewmen, deemed beyond saving amid the influx.

Phlox himself ran between the biobeds, attending to several severe cases simultaneously. Waving his scanner above one, then the next, he barked out orders to a pair of medics who dashed behind him, applying hyposprays of medication which would ease the pain, but do little more. The serious injuries—broken limbs, lacerated organs, and plasma burns—would be tackled on the second pass through, once Phlox had ascertained the nature of each person's wounds.

T'Pol gritted her teeth, and did what was necessary. "Doctor!" she barked loudly.

Phlox's head snapped around. "I'm a little busy, Commander!"

"It's urgent, Doctor!" she shouted.

"More urgent then—" Phlox caught the desperate look in T'Pol's eyes, and realized that—whatever it was—T'Pol's situation was more urgent then even the critical care of the crew. "I can only spare a few minutes, Commander," he warned her as T'Pol drew his attention to a diagnostic screen. Leaving the severely wounded cut against his medical training, but the doctor understood the situation—this was a battlefield, and the greater mission trumped individual lives.

Her fingers flying quickly, T'Pol pulled up the sensor scans. "The anomaly outside is rapidly growing in intensity," she informed the physician. "But we're unable to leave. We need a medical solution to preserve organic tissue, as long as possible."

"Shit," Phlox muttered, not realizing that he had picked up a human curse word. His fingers flew almost as quickly over the controls. The analyses flew before his eyes. "Once it reaches critical intensity, the entire crew will be dead within minutes." He watched as the medical schematics broke down the DNA damage, and reconstructed the helixes in bizarre, warped patterns. No living tissue could survive it, and he saw no way to prevent it.

Phlox spoke tersely. "The best I can do is to synthesize a neurolytic compound that will keep us conscious for a few minutes longer. It won't do anything for the pain, and it won't do anything to prolong our survival."

"Every bit matters, Doctor," T'Pol replied, equally terse. As the medical crew continued to move with considerable alacrity, the commander formed a plan of action. "Give me the information, Doctor, and I'll take care of the inoculations."

Phlox was quiet for a second has he pulled up the necessary data. "There you go, Commander," he answered, and without another look, he dove back into triage. "Davidson!" he barked. "Run down to stores and get another liter of burn cream beta-four!"

An alarm rang out over the chaos of sickbay. "Crash-cart to bed three!" he shouted, arriving at the bed simultaneous with the medical cart. The injured crewman was jerking wildly, heaving desperately for air. "Point-two-joules!" Phlox ordered as he grabbed the cardio paddles from the cart, and held them to the wounded man's chest. "Now!" The crewman jumped under the electronic stimulation.

"Increase by point-two! Now!" Phlox shouted, and the man's body leapt again. "Again!"

Focusing her once-potent control, T'Pol pressed down the surge of panic and departed sickbay, deftly evading a staggering crewman traveling the other way.

…

Dolim bristled with furious confidence as he strode down the length of an access conduit. In keeping with the plan of battle, he had transported over to the weapon to personally oversee its assault on the humans' homeworld, an assault that would bring about the permanent extinction of the humans and the permanent ascension of the reptilians in the new Xindi Union. He could have left the details of the assault to his subordinates—some of them were competent enough—but he didn't want to miss the moment of victory.

Dolim located his ever-present lieutenant. "When we exit the vortex, how close will we be?" he asked, with a bizarre, snarling glee.

"Approximately fifty millions kilometers," the lieutenant answered. It was roughly the distance between the orbits of Earth and Mars. For vessels that could travel at significant fractions of light speed, the distance was of little consequence; the reptilian fleet and its superpowered weapon would reach the humans' planet within minutes of emerging from the corridor.

…

The mad dash back to the impulse rockets resembled a slalom course more than a sprint.

The drives, located near the junction of the warp pylons and the secondary beam, were at the rear end of one of the longest—and least-used—corridors on the _Enterprise._ Extending backwards down the length of the access bridges, with few key systems along the length, the corridors had received short shrift, and were still littered with a confusing array of jutting, ragged beams, chunks of bulkhead, and open conduits.

And, Travis noted in passing, the life support systems were not at full strength. So close to the absolute coldness outside the starship, the corridors were chilled well below comfort, the only heat that which radiated from the plasma accelerators running behind the fractured walls. And they weren't supposed to radiate heat.

Travis had dispatched a second team down the starboard side, sending his own team to the heavier-damaged port junction. The team of Mayweather, Rodgers, and Zaniya moved with all deliberate speed through the jumbled course, only coming to a halt when the hatchway to the monitoring room opened before them; a wave of heat extruded, stunning them into temporary stillness.

The monitoring room was a multi-purpose facility, designed to manage both the impulse drives and the warp plasma accelerators. The room itself was roughly rectangular, running with the length of the ship, and around the front half, computer consoles dotted the walls; to the interior side, another hatchway was locked shut, which led directly into the mechanical guts of the accelerator. Essentially one long tube, built to exacting specifications, it was ringed by equally-large coolant conduits along its entire length, and the coolant tanks, pumping stations, and manifolds were located behind the door. As well, jutting at an angle across the rear third of the room, the accelerator stood at roughly eyelevel, allowing almost a full meter of clearance beneath for engineering crews to move about.

It was the hatchway behind the accelerator that interested Travis.

Jammed shut, the door did not last long against the hurried efforts of the repair team; a few twisted coils of explosives made short work of the heavy hatch, rendering it useless—but open. Inside was a much smaller room that eerily resembled a mechanical closet; no larger than a meter square, filled with pipes, conduits, nozzles, and old-fashioned levers, it was the machine guts of the impulse rockets.

And, Travis was glad to note, mostly intact. The cramped design, and its location tucked within the reinforced platings of the stardrive section, had saved it. Several of the conduits were hissing, but they were eminently fixable.

Behind the curved walls on the left and right of the room were the impulse engine power plants—fusion-powered reactors that channeled the leftover deuterium slush from the warp drive into controlled nuclear reactions. There were four such reactors, two on either side of the stardrive section. Gritting his teeth, Travis chose one and started powering it up; in the absence of high-level diagnostics, he had to watch the reaction readings for any oblique hint of an imbalance or a microfracture.

If the impulse reactors worked, they were still only one step along; next came the fusion manifolds, the rocket coils themselves, and finally, the vectored exhaust grills, all of which had to work in order to get the _Enterprise _moving again.

…

Ironically, given the damage that the _Enterprise _had sustained, the other crews working on the stardrive section found it easier to access their work points from outside; and thus, while Travis and his counterparts tried to power up the impulse rockets, three-person teams were conducting EV work. Two of the teams were, in fact, only meters away from the rockets, installing exhaust vents for the warp plasma accelerators. The remaining teams huddled around the pylon structural junctions, releasing the stem bolts that held on the massive pylons.

Around them, the anomaly continued to grow, eating away at the weave of space. The repair teams tried to avoid glancing over their shoulders, but the crackling brown effect intruded upon their awareness, reminding the humans of just how little time they had left.

…

T'Pol barely turned her head when the alarm triggered, ringing out a deafening klaxon across the bridge. Instead, she stood immobile next to Ensign Rahimi, watching the sensor readings on the monitor of the situation room. On the monitor, the schematics of the anomaly continued to change, showing the quantum constants of this realm being ripped apart by the trans-dimensional technology as the region of space was consumed and transformed into something truly alien and unnatural.

T'Pol ignored the alarm because she knew what it was for, and knew that she could do nothing. She watched the sensor readings scroll across the monitor, bringing the moment she had been dreading. It was unavoidable, unstoppable, could not even be slowed by any method at her disposal. The anomaly had reached its critical point, and it overflowed before her eyes, rewriting the subquanta at a depth she could scarcely even conceive.

It was up to the engineering crews. T'Pol had distributed the neurolytic compound to every crewmember, but it would only provide a temporary reprieve, fleeting in the cosmic scales that governed the anomaly. In minutes, their organic tissue would begin to harden and rigidify, not unlike wet clay underneath a hot sun. As the tissue hardened, it would break apart, causing incredible levels of pain as the once-vibrant cells broke into dust. Death would come quickly, after that; and later, well after the last crewmember succumbed to the unholy embrace of endless sleep, the fragmentary molecules of organic material would come apart at their quantum bonds.

It was all up to the engineers.

…

Thalen was unsurprised to see the two human officers clustered over the console, studying the blueprints of the weapon. _As well they should be_, he thought. Getting them there was _Thalen's _concern; forming an assault plan was up to the humans, for despite Thalen's vast knowledge of the weapon, he had no training in assault tactics.

"What have you figured out?" Thalen asked politely, coming up beside Archer and Reed. He looked down at the screen, and saw that they were studying the reactor controls.

"We've begun to piece together a plan," Archer replied absently. He stroked his chin, and was surprised to find so little stubble; _have things really happened that quickly?_

"Many thanks to you, Thalen," Malcolm added. "If you hadn't translated the script for us, we wouldn't even know what we were looking at."

"We're going to try to implode the weapon by creating a forced overload in the reactor," Archer explained, pausing to allow Thalen a chance to comment. When the scientist didn't, Archer went on. "We can do it by triggering an inversion sequence, but that brings us to a problem—we don't know the right procedure. If it's not done in the right order—"

"The safeties will kick in and prevent the inversion," Thalen finished. "I helped Degra create the system. He encrypted the precise sequence, but I believe I can decrypt it." The young scientist was happy for the opportunity to help; if Degra had come to believe so strongly in these humans, then Thalen would see that determination through to its conclusion.

"I wish I could tell you to take your time," Malcolm commented apologetically. "But we need this information before we can finish our plan."

"Of course, Lieutenant. Just give me a few minutes—it's just a matter of isolating which encryption protocol Degra used."

"Commander!" The technician's voice pulled Thalen's attention away from the monitor. "We've gotten close enough to isolate their signatures!"

"How many ships?" Thalen stepped back into the main portion of the bridge, and looked down over the sensor technician's shoulder. While it was impossible—with Xindi technology, at least—to "see" other vessels from a distance inside in the corridor, each vessel left a detectable wake behind. With a little skill, the wakes could be analyzed to determine the nature of the ships that had caused them.

"I'm reading eleven reptilian warships," the technician reported. "And the weapon?"

"Just reptilian?" Archer's voice carried from the rear of the room. "I thought we saw an insectoid ship enter with them."

"We did, Captain," Thalen confirmed without turning. "Nonetheless, these readings are incontrovertible. The insectoid ship is no longer with them."

"Why would the insectoids leave the corridor?" The technician was puzzled by the question.

"Perhaps they needed to make some repairs," Thalen suggested. He never would have guessed the real answer: that the insectoid ship _hadn't _left the corridor, but instead had been reduced to a flying pile of space junk. "But we do know that we have one less ship to reckon with. Keep working on the evasive path for insertion, Technician. I have a code to crack."

…

"Mayweather to Engineering!" Travis hollered into his hand communicator. While the intercom was still offline, the hand systems had been restored; the logic was something that Travis would leave for T'Pol to hammer out. "Engineering, come in!"

"Tucker here!" The voice crackled over the communicator, but Travis could make out the words. "We need some good news, Travis! We just passed zero time!"

Mayweather knew what that meant: they had less than fifteen minutes to get the _Enterprise_in the corridor before the brown gloop outside consumed them. Every minute—every second—from here on out was added time that would demand a painful, and eventually fatal, payment.

"We got them working!" Travis shouted back, imagining the cheer on the other end of the line. 'Working' was perhaps a misnomer; the fusion reaction was in very real danger of overheating, several microfractures in the tanks were in danger of exploding, and the vectored control nodes were stubbornly stuck in one place, giving the ship a 'straight' flight that was several degrees off true. But the rockets would fire, and the _Enterprise_would move. "Are the EV teams done yet?"

"The nacelle teams finished a few minutes ago!" Trip responded. The structural pylons that once had held the warp nacelles had been severed from the vessel at their base, and were free-drifting into the heart of the anomaly. The warp plasma accelerators, which ran through the pylons to power the nacelles, were capped off with thoroughly blunt duranium sheeting. And if the nacelle teams were finished, that meant the exhaust teams were done as well, having crafted the emergency chutes out of scrap conduit to vent off the superheated plasma. The _Enterprise_would have to move soon, before the heated material built up by the vents; but the odds were that the anomaly would kill them first.

"Are you ready to test-fire the rockets?" Trip asked, shouting at the top of his lungs.

"Just give us the go!" Travis answered.

"Be advised, Travis: the exhaust EV teams are still outside to conduct any spot repairs of the rockets!"

"Understood, Commander! Make sure they maintain distance!"

"GO, Travis!" Trip hollered across the comm channel.

Tightening his jaw, Mayweather engaged the activation injectors of the reactors. Seven of the eight port injectors fired cleanly, sending atoms of tritium into the deuterium slush at near-light speed.

Inside each reactor, a miniature star was born. The added energy cause the deuterium fuel to ignite, and the atoms fused together, rearranging their structural components to form atoms of helium and shooting out free neutrons. The reactions cascaded as each one released more energy than it consumed, and the impulse manifolds collected and concentrated that energy, converting it to the thrust needed to rocket the starship forward.

A microfracture in one of the manifolds gave out.

Faster than the eye could watch, a plume of raw fusion plasma shot outward through the rocket nozzles and out the exhaust grill, blossoming outward into the open space behind. Of the three-man EV team standing ready for spot repairs, two were sufficiently off to the side to avoid the plume; but the third was too close. He vaporized instantly, gone in the superheated gas.

Frantic voices leapt across the comm channels, and reacting instinctively, Travis shut down the manifolds, cutting off the plume. _Damnit, _he thought tiredly, uncertain of which was worse: that he had killed a crewmate, or that the impulse rockets weren't ready.

…

Even the advanced sensors of the _Enterprise—_at least, the sensors that still functioned—could no longer penetrate through the brown fog of the anomaly. T'Pol knew that the vortex was in front of them; intellectually, she could pinpoint the exact position from memory, but she was no longer able to see it on the viewscreen. She was no longer able to see much of _anything_, in fact; the brown goop continued to thicken like the bad plomeek soup her maternal grandmother used to make.

"Commander, something weird is happening to my skin," Ensign Hutchinson said with alarm, turning about in the helm chair. The bridge crew—Hutchinson at the helm, Rahimi at tactical, Sorenson on the comm, and T'Pol at science—had returned to their stations, waiting for the moment when engineering gave them the go-ahead. The wait was tense, even for a Vulcan.

The physical changes taking place did not make it any easier. Their skin was cracking like a dry riverbed, and as the ravines grew deeper, the pain began. Mild at first, like a temporary itch, it slowly dug in deeper, extending its claws into the tender flesh. "This was expected," T'Pol found herself saying calmly, even as she sought to subdue the pain. "Try not to scratch it."

Rahimi had posted a digital timer on the viewscreen, counting down the minutes until the quantum reordering would rip the crew apart at their organic seams. As it flicked below eleven minutes, T'Pol started squirming, and she tried to control the unfamiliar feeling of panic deep within her.

…

Travis put the death out of his mind as he coordinated with the EV repair team. Replacing an impulse manifold was a lengthy, involved task, requiring that the reactor be shut down for several hours; it was just as well that they didn't even have a replacement manifold, Travis thought. It was going to be a frantic effort to patch the old one up, and pray that it held.

The EV team slipped themselves inside the rocket nozzles, careful not to touch the heated alloys around them, and less than delicately began the process of spot-welding a duranium patch onto the manifold. It could not be rushed any faster. It was not a problem of welding the path tight; it was a problem of ensuring that they didn't accidentally cover one of the thrust valves.

With nothing left to do, Travis stood inside the monitoring room, watching as the back of his hand dried and cracked.

…

"We got it!" Trip yelled over the communicators, and the bridge slid into action.

"Bring us about, fifteen degrees north!" T'Pol ordered, drawing the coordinates from her memory. "Drop to two thousand meters!"

"Aye, sir!" Hutchinson replied as he made the adjustments. The maneuvering thrusters engaged sporadically, partially positioning the starship for entry.

_It's of no consequence, _T'Pol reminded herself. This would be about brute strength, not finesse.

"We're drifting port!" Rahimi shouted out.

"Track starboard, eighty-two-mark-zero!" T'Pol responded. "Do you have the vortex on sensors?"

"Not yet, sir!"

"Altering port, three degrees!"

"Projected distance, twenty thousand kilometers!"

"I need a target!"

"No sign yet!"

"Prepare to reduce speed!"

"That's not advised, sir!"

"_I've got it!_ Alter heading zero-zero-mark-fifteen! Range, fifteen thousand kilometers!"

"Do we have visual contact?"

"Not yet!"

"When you have visual, take us to one-quarter impulse!"

"Correct for drift! Zero-zero-four-mark-zero!"

"I have visual! Going to one-quarter impulse!"

"Event horizon in fourteen!"

"Watch that drift!"

"Hold your course! We don't have a margin!"

"In three—two—one!"

And with nary a whisper, the _Enterprise_slid into the subspace corridor.

…

Starfleet Chief-of-Staff Admiral Forrest stood up from his desk and wandered over to his office window, running a hand through his rapidly thinning hair. To describe the last few months as "merely brutal" would be a callous understatement, he realized; in fact, to describe _any _day since _that _day—April 24—as less than cruel would be a bleak injustice.

As he gazed out over the Presidio, the admiral could easily recall the details of _that _day. The panicked calls, the urgent summons early in the morning, before the light of the sun had even breached the skies over San Francisco; the mad dash to Starfleet Command, the unbelievable news that was trickling in—_it had to a prank, or a scare, or something, this is too unreal to believe_—the first hours of chaos that swept the planet, as rumors abounded, each more fantastic than the last. _There was one weapon—no, there was two—no, there's an entire fleet!_ And the most fantastic of all—the emerging claim that a swath of land, several thousand kilometers long, had been vaporized from Earth's surface.

Starfleet was not chartered to engage in planetary disaster rescues—to be fair, no organization was truly chartered to deal with a catastrophe of that magnitude—but as emergency services scrambled to address the situation on the ground, Admiral Forrest volunteered Starfleet's services to track the attacker. Starfleet was still a small organization, tasked primarily with exploring the Terran system and managing the nascent space lanes emerging high above Earth, but the attacker had done little to cover his tracks. It was only a matter of hours before Starfleet had tracked the attacker's descent to his crash-landing in central Asia, and before the day was out, the remnants of the attacking vessel were laid out in the best forensic bay Earth had to offer.

The admiral detached a second task force to follow the attacker backwards, and as they dissected the logs of the near-orbit sensor grid, the attacker's entrance vector could be plotted, leading away into an unknown section of space.

Thus, by the end of _that _day, Admiral Forrest knew absolutely nothing of consequence.

An unknown alien, using an unknown weapon of unknown technology, had come from an unknown portion of space to attack Earth for reasons unknown.

As credible reports emerged from ground zero over the course of _that _day, the news grew worse and worse. The casualty estimates were revised upward, and upward again; incredible sums of three million, then four, came out, and in the days that followed, as missing persons were located and others were verified gone, the final estimated death toll topped seven million. In fact, they would never know to the exact person how many had died _that _day; the numbers were too high to count with such accuracy.

In the wake of _that _day, Starfleet's mission changed.

Formerly a small organization within the United Earth government, it rapidly grew as Earth's politicians realized that Starfleet was the closest they had to a stellar defense force. Admiral Forrest was tasked with overseeing this growth, this conversion of Starfleet—and it was only his stubbornness that prevented Starfleet's original mission from being lost amidst the panic following _that _day.

They had been stressful days, lived on the edge of frantic energy and paranoia; while the initial fears of another, immediate attack proved unfounded, it was one of Forrest's own—Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starfleet vessel _Enterprise_—who had arrived with intelligence from an anonymous source claiming that the attack had merely been a dry run to test technology. Coming soon—maybe hours, maybe years—was a second weapon, this one powerful enough to shatter Earth down to its core.

And so, as Earth lived each day since _that _day under the barrel of an unseen gun, humanity found itself unable to regain the rosy sense of security they had once enjoyed. In brutal fashion, humans had learned that the galaxy was a dangerous place; and Earth lacked the resources necessary to defend itself against hostile races. Insecurity—and fear—and anxiety—abounded.

In the stead, a burgeoning political movement began to form, opposing the peace-and-prosperity platform of Prime Minister Samuels. This movement, connected to an underground force calling itself "Terra Prime," advocated fighting hostility with hostility, and encouraged growing paranoia around the planet. It was a dead-end movement advocating a dead-end cause, Forrest knew, but fear can be a potent political weapon when wielded by the unscrupulous.

And each day began to run into the next as Starfleet scrambled to fight a war, for the survival of the human race, but also for the survival of its _humanity._

Forrest's eyes gazed across the flower blossoms lighting up the Presidio. The colors were vibrant and full of life, and he sometimes wondered how he had been so lucky to get an office with such a view.

"Admiral Forrest." His reverie was interrupted by the intercom. "Please report to Command Operations."

…

Commander Dolim had his pick of command locations; with eleven ships and the weapon at his disposal, he could oversee the coming attack from any of them, but it was with a sense of anticipation that he chose to use the weapon itself as his command center. The commanders of his warships could handle any resistance they might encounter; Dolim wanted to be free to concentrate on the deadly assault itself, to watch as the humans' planet disintegrated below them. The death of the humans would guarantee the survival—and preeminence—of the reptilians, the culmination of his life's dreams. And he would see it firsthand.

"We're about to drop into normal space," his lieutenant reported.

"Any sign of pursuit?" Dolim growled.

"We're detecting a primate shuttle behind us," another technician answered. "About twenty minutes behind."

A primate shuttle was of no importance; the unarmed craft did not have a hope of stopping Dolim's fleet. In fact, it was more likely that its occupants were allied Xindi, come to see the moment of their triumph.

"Stand by to initiate the firing protocols," Dolim ordered. "Let's not waste any time."

…

By the time Admiral Forrest trotted down two flights of stairs and one hallway, Command Operations had fallen into silent surrealism. Beneath the harsh, screaming wails of alarms, blinking bright, multi-hued lights signaling a dizzying array of emergencies, the Operations staff moved only with deliberate precision, their cool grace belying the bedlam above and around them. In the few moments Forrest had to observe, he couldn't help but take pride in the calm demeanor with which his staff acted.

Stretching across one wall of Operations—in a design inspired by the pre-World WarAmericanJohnsonSpaceCenter—was a collection of computer monitors, which normally showed dozens of minor schematics, camera views, and on occasion, even tapped into the comnet news reports. Designed with the ability to work in concert, due to the vagaries of day-to-day business they rarely did so.

When Forrest looked up, the screen was bifurcated, split down the middle with a motley collection of smaller, analytical pictures ringing the edge. On the left was straight-eye imagery of a section of space. Curtained black with thousands of dotted stars, it showed nothing, and the admiral had to translate the notations at the bottom to even identify it; it showed a set of coordinates, in the interior of the Terran system, remarkably close to Earth.

The image on the right showed far more. It revealed, with false-light imagery, the subspace topography of the same coordinates. And something was very, very wrong.

Earth scientists, having discovered subspace, were still relative novices when it came to understanding the ethereal twisting of ordinary space-time; and Forrest had advanced through the ranks of Starfleet as a pilot and administrator, not as a scientist. But even his eye noted that naturally-occurring subspace fields looked nothing like what was happening on screen.

The subspace topography, translated into two dimensions, was being sucked into an infantesimal point, forming a cone-shaped body that vaguely resembled the hypothesized structure of a black hole. Starting from a broad event horizon, the strands of subspace bowed and stretched back to the pinpoint. The violent array of colors illustrated the amount of power at work to create such an effect.

Forrest may not have known much about subspace topography, but he knew enough to recognize that this was not normal.

As the Operations staff worked rapidly to understand what was occurring, Forrest's eyes were drawn to a smaller diagram along the side of the screen, showing the gravimetric distortion effect along the event horizon. It was changing slowly, but unlike the other effects, there were no fluctuations; it was moving in one direction only.

Something—the subspace distortion, or something in it—was massive enough to bend gravity.

"Admiral!" One of the staffers chose that moment to shout across the large room. "Something's coming out of the distortion!"

The enemy fleet emerged from visual nothingness.

…

Claiming command prerogative, Commander Dolim had ordered that his new flagship—the weapon itself—be the first to emerge from the subspace corridor. It had little to do with leadership; rather, he wanted to be the first to see the humans' home system with his natural eyes, and on the cusp of his victory, the view did not disappoint.

He soaked the sight in greedily before reverting to business. "Are you detecting any Earth vessels?" Dolim barked, sending an awe-struck technician scrambling back to his controls.

"No vessels on approach," the technician answered hastily. "There are several vessels of unknown classification in Earth orbit. They have not yet reacted to our presence."

_Such a pity_, Dolim thought. He knew Earth had nothing that could rival even one of his warships—it was a safe assumption that Archer's ship was the best they had to offer. But he wanted the humans to understand their doom, and the futility of their struggle, before he struck the final death blow to their pathetic, warm-blooded race.

"Focus on Earth," Dolim ordered, and the viewing monitor on the command platform zoomed in on the humans' planet. He couldn't help but laugh at the ironies as he saw it; the blue-white globe revealed vast oceans and a great surplus of water. "The aquatics would feel right at home here," he snarled. Somehow, it was only fitting that Kiaphet's species would choose to betray the Xindi Union for a race that dwelt in so much water. "Time to orbit?" he demanded impatiently, barring the stray thoughts from his mind. There would be time for them later, when he stood alone atop the Union.

"Fifty million kilometers, as predicted," a nameless technician answered. "Flight time for the weapon is twenty minutes; flight time for the warships is…six minutes."

_As expected_, Dolim told himself. The weapon moved slower than his battle craft; it was an unavoidable consequence of physics. The wait did not bother him; he _wanted _the humans squirming in fear and panic, giving in to their terror as they watched the skies for the imminent arrival of death. Such a complete victory would only cement his status as the lord of the Xindi. _Perhaps even more._

"Commander, we're detecting a small, manned satellite in the vicinity!" The technician's excitement fueled his report. "Some sort of science lab. Unarmed!"

…

It didn't matter what vessel Captain Archer was on: as they approached the end of the corridor, hot on the heels of the reptilian fleet, Archer stood behind the helm console, struggling to keep his foot from dancing in anticipation.

The navigations officer ran a countdown. "Normal space in three…two…one!"

"Location of the weapon?" Thalen demanded immediately, jumping to his own feet. He moved forward to stand beside the human captain.

"Eight hundred thousand kilometers, dead ahead."

"Malcolm!" Archer turned his head to shout. "Get your team down to the transporter bay!"

"Aye, sir!" Malcolm's reply faded away as the lieutenant was out and gone.

"Tactical report!" Thalen ordered next.

"Eleven reptilian warships escorting the weapon. I'm reading no response from Earth!"

_And there won't be much, _Archer knew. Earth simply didn't have intrastellar defenses to send after the reptilians. Whatever was going to happen, it would be up to his boarding party and Thalen's crew.

"Sir, one of the warships is altering course," Thalen's aide reported a moment later. "They're heading for a small, artificial satellite."

Archer frowned. "Are we in visual range?" he asked, uncertain of just what the reptiles were targeting. His question was answered with visual imagery of a self-contained spacelab. "That's Yosemite Three," Archer breathed softly as he recognized the construct.

Thalen spoke quietly as well. "A military installation?"

Archer refused to look away. "No," he answered. "A medical research post. Usually thirty to forty civilians aboard."

"Any weapons?" Thalen asked hopelessly, knowing what the answer would be.

"None."

…

"Our mission is not just to destroy Earth," Dolim snarled with eagerness as he watched the warship close within firing range. His tongue flickered out as he imagined the taste of the humans' fear. "Once their little planet is gone, we're to continue throughout the system and eradicate every trace of human existence. I see no reason not to begin now. Kolos, fire when ready."

The reptilian warship fired two shots, drilling the spacelab with practiced accuracy. It exploded in a fireball of oxygen. The miniature fragments drifted away.

…

Years of decades of training and practice kicked into place as the Operations staff managed their business with grim efficiency. The pallor of death's sword was rapidly approaching; not yet dangling over their heads, it would be with scant time, but panic was banished from the control room as Forrest's crack team went about their jobs, scrambling with cool detachment to prepare Earth's defenses.

Unfortunately, amidst the controlled, frenetic action, there was not much they could do besides watch and report.

…

Comprised primarily of unarmed, short-range science and scout vessels, Starfleet's actual star fleet had not been designed to handle combat of any sort. It had been a matter of lengthy discussion within the chambers of Starfleet Command; some felt that adding weapons to their vessels betrayed the peaceful, scientific purpose embodied in the organization's charter. Once you add weapons, these people argued, you'll never go back; once the door is opened for the militarization of Starfleet, you betray its founding principles.

A small faction felt that such beliefs were the epitome of naiveté; every government, they argued, needed the ability to defend itself from outsiders. While scientific exploration was good, Starfleet's primary responsibility should be the interstellar defense of the human race.

A third faction, headed by Admiral Forrest, thought that the argument missed the immediate point: for Starfleet _was _incontrovertibly tasked with policing the space lanes of the Terran system, a task which would inevitably require armed scouts. And while the others argued the moral implications of militarizing Starfleet, Forrest quietly began a pilot program to create a small, fast, short-range fighter/transport that could provide a platform for intrasolar policing and emergency rescue.

In the aftermath of the first Xindi attack, as the state of alarm and panic refused to die away, the admiral accelerated the program, taking it from the drawing board to actual production. Over the previous ten months, two dozen of these craft had been built.

In a retrofitted cosmodrome on the Kazakh plains, the battle alarm sounded through every building and across every airfield, summoning the fighter crews from every corner of the base. As they ran towards the departure strips, the technicians moved with trained precision and speed to wheel the vessels from their protective hangars, running takeoff diagnostics on the move. The two sets of people came together at the top of the runways, the pilots scrambling into their cockpits and the technicians positioning the craft for takeoff.

One by one, the fighters shot down the runway, lifting off from the reinforced thermoconcrete and blazing scarce meters above the newly-scorched grasses of the steppes. Kicking in the massive afterburners—only allowed in the atmosphere in emergency circumstances—each pilot pulled the nose of their fighter up, and within moments, they ripped through the troposphere, past the stratosphere, and into the mesosphere. In all, nineteen of the craft departed the base; four were already in orbit, conducing standard patrols, and the twenty-fourth fighter was in the mechanic's bay with a broken helium-release valve.

Rocketing upwards, the fighters crossed into the thermosphere, the level of ordinary Earth orbit; as they passed through the satellite grids that ringed Earth, the nineteen vessels came together in wedge-shaped battle formations and reduced their rate of ascent as they climbed past 500 kilometers. They moved into the exosphere, and then left Earth behind, setting a course for the unidentified fleet that had suddenly appeared in the Terran system.

…

"The fighters have left orbit and entered an intercept course, ETA five minutes," an Operations officer reported, his voice traveling easily over the subdued tones of his colleagues.

With the new danger manifest, the viewing screens had changed, relegating the subspace disturbance to a smaller monitor along the edge; the central bulk of the monitors instead lit up with a variety of symbols, each one representing a spacecraft. The tactical display also tallied telemetry readings from each vessel, showing speed, vector, and ETAs for prime weapons range. The distances involved may have been vast—fifty million kilometers—but the display showed just how quickly the ships were moving towards intercept.

"Can we get an ID on that fleet?" Forrest demanded as he watched the vessels near each other. Simple logic suggested that it was the anticipated Xindi assault; the large sphere in the center bore strong visual resemblances to the test weapon that had attacked Earth the previous April. As it was, given the limited body of knowledge Starfleet Command had regarding the Xindi, a firm ID would likely be impossible.

Far more troubling, Command had no information regarding the defenses of Xindi warships. True, Forrest had twenty-three light fighters to counter with: but for all he knew, they were greatly outgunned. There were eleven enemy warships to reckon with, each one considerably larger than the Terran counterparts. The coming battle did not look promising.

…

On board the _Enterprise, _the trip through the corridor got worse with every passing moment. Such a flight was not, under any circumstances, smooth; and the inertial dampeners, which would ordinarily be tasked with quashing the turbulent effects of the passage, had been mortally stricken before the starship even entered the corridor. Trip and the engineering crew were holding the dampeners together the best they could, eking out every iota of stability they could garner; but as the dampeners were pummeled by their internal damage and by the external forces, things would only grow more punishing for the crew.

Following their initial impulse jump into the corridor, Travis Mayweather—briefed on his new command duties by T'Pol—had climbed to the bridge, and he now sat in the command chair. Despite the violent turbulence, he did not move; with the dampeners weakened, the inertial forces kept him plastered against the back of the chair, and he had to consciously flex his chest to draw in each labored breath of soot-filled air.

Around him, the rest of the bridge crew was in similar straits. Hutchinson was plastered into his chair; Rahimi and T'Pol, at their respective stations, both refused to turn their swivel-mounted chairs, knowing that they would be tossed bodily from their mounts. And even that wasn't a guarantee; in a particularly rough moment of turbulence, when the ship had jumped _laterally _by almost a hundred kilometers, Sorenson had been tossed from her seat and flew into a bulkhead. With a struggle, she had regained her post, but one arm hung limply by her side.

"Bridge to engineering!" Travis shouted out, triggering the intercom panel in the arm of the command chair. "What the hell's going on? Power just fell ten percent!"

"Hang on one moment!" Travis didn't recognize the voice, but given the quality of the comm channel, that meant little.

The voice returned, a little stronger. "We're reading explosions on E-deck!" That was of little surprise—and little help. E-deck contained a number of primary systems, from the deflector array at the fore to the impulse rockets aft, and any one of them could be behind the explosions.

"We're losing thrust on impulse rocket-2!" The report came through a moment later. Helpless to do anything, Travis could only grit his teeth; the urgent patches on the impulse drives were starting to give out, and the _Enterprise_had yet to reach the end of the corridor.

…

"Commander Dolim." The technician's voice carried only a hint of concern. "Degra's shuttle has exited the corridor."

Dolim growled in dissatisfaction. If it had been a warship, or a battle scout, or something that had _any _sort of weapons, he would not have minded the interruption; but as it was, the unarmed shuttle was nothing more than an irritating distraction. "Who's on the shuttle?" he demanded, unwillingly turning his attention to dealing with the interloper.

"I'm reading eight primates and twenty-five humans," his technician reported.

"And no weapons capability?" Dolim snarled. It was unlikely, but the possibility existed that a weapons bank had been hotwired into the small craft.

"No, sir," the technician answered. "Reading no weapons capability. No defensive systems at all. Sir, they're on a straight-line course for the weapon."

_What could they possibly be thinking? _It puzzled the reptilian general, and he didn't like that: understanding the enemy was the route to victory, and he did not understand this futile endeavor. "How soon?"

His technician properly interpreted the request. "They're traveling faster than we are," the reptile replied. "They'll be within standard weapons range in two minutes."

_Standard weapons range for a ship with no weapons…_It may be nonsense, but he would treat it as a real threat. "Order Kolos and Daron to intercept," he ordered. _I don't know what stunt those humans are trying to pull, but we'll put a stop to it._

…

Forrest watched in horror as the wave of fighters was blown apart in the starlit sky.

The twenty-three craft, split into attack wings, came in hard and fast, relying on their small size and speed for protection as they crashed into the ranks of Xindi warships. Each fighter carried a pair of phase cannon banks, and they came in close, intending to lay on a debilitating strafing run before circling about to begin the pinprick strikes.

As a battle tactic, it was a fair one, and may even have succeeded against a battle group with similar levels of technology.

But the Xindi defensive systems were far more advanced.

The targets may have been small and fast, but the reptilian targeting arrays were able to lock on the fighters, thus bringing to bear the warships' greater firepower.

Forrest watched in horror as the attack wave disintegrated in the teeth of the Xindi. Of the twenty-three fighters, eight blossomed in miniaturized atomic fireballs as the enemy fire ruptured their impulse reactors, triggering catastrophic meltdowns. Another seven staggered away from the battle line, reeling like habitual drunks after a long night of carousing, unable to even travel in a straight line. They were easy targets, and would not last much longer.

On the great viewscreen in Command Operations, Forrest watched as the remaining eight fighters peeled out, jinking to avoid the concentrated weapons fire that nipped their tails. Two of the enemy warships turned to chase them, and Forrest could not even seek solace from the hubris of the enemy: given the first attack, two warships was more than sufficient to deal with the eight fighters.

…

"They're arming their torpedoes!" Thalen's sensor technician shouted in warning as the small shuttle shot towards the supersized weapon. The saving grace for Degra's crew—for every crew fighting to stop Commander Dolim—was the slow speed of the weapon. It was taking crucial minutes longer to cross the gulf separating the corridor vertex and the humans' planet; crucial minutes that the faster—and unarmed—shuttle could use to fulfill its mission.

"Engaging evasive pattern alpha—now!" The helmsman engaged the preset pattern, sending the shuttle into a bewildering array of jumps, loops, and stutters designed to confuse the reptilian weapons officers. It wouldn't last for long; the reptiles would eventually achieve a targeting lock, but success was measured by every second they could gain. The shuttle had to penetrate the protective field of the warships and pull within transporter range of the weapon.

"Captain Archer—get down to the transporter!" Thalen shouted across the bridge. The rest of the assault team had already reported to the bay; Archer had lingered behind to watch their insertion, but recognizing the import of Thalen's command, the captain turned to leave the bridge.

As he left, Archer shouted back over his shoulder. "Remember, Thalen, no heroics! Just get us in and then keep them off your ass!" And the captain got as far as the doorway, where he staggered to the side, colliding with a bulkhead.

"They have targeting lock!" The report was unnecessary. Everyone on board the small shuttle had felt the blow of reptilian weapons blasting the hull with disruptive waves of high-powered energy, and if that was insufficient, alarms screamed across the ship, signaling ruptures in several critical systems.

…

Dolim watched the tactical display with glee as Kolos and Daron circled in towards the stricken shuttle. It had no weapons, its defensive shields were down, life support fading, and the magnetic containment fields holding back the deadly antimatter were failing. In a matter of minutes, Degra's vessel would destroy itself in a spectacular reaction

But Dolim had little interest in dragging out the death throes of the pathetic little craft. He had a far more important battle to focus on, and he would be able to taste the deaths of millions of others: a few humans were not worth the distraction, and so he sent an order to Kolos: _finish them NOW._

Kolos' warship exploded.

…

"I'm reading another vessel!" The sensor technician coughed in the viscous smoke. "It just dropped out from high warp!"

The comm technician hacked up a clod of soot. "It's hailing us, sir!"

"On screen!" Thalen ordered. He grabbed the back of the helmsman's chair, trying to steady himself.

Thalen didn't recognize the being on the screen—not that he expected to. It was humanoid, with the standard two arms, two legs, one torso and one head; it was clad in some variety of black leather. And the being's skin was _blue—_not a dark blue, but rather the soft hue of a summer sky. On its head was close-cropped white hair and a pair of antenna.

Archer limped forward, favoring his right ankle. "I'm busy at the moment, Shran."

_Archer knew this being, _Thalen realized. It was, in fact, Commander Shran of the Andorian Defense Fleet. Archer and the _Enterprise_had had several encounters with Shran, sometimes as foes and sometimes as friends; through it, a strong bond of mutual respect had formed between the two men.

"You're a fool, pinkskin, but I always knew that!" Shran retorted. "That ship you're on has no chance!"

Archer steadied himself with a console. "Did you come all this way just to tell me that?"

"You're lucky I was in the neighborhood!" Shran's eyes took on a maniacal twinkle. "I came to keep those vermin off your ass, Archer! Get your shuttle in range—we'll deal with those warships!"

Archer shook his head in amazement. _Such are the quirks of fortune that determine the fate of worlds._

…

Deep in the belly of the _Enterprise_, chaos took a turn for the worse as environmental controls finally gave up the long battle against the fires consuming the starship. Bulkheads ruptured in every room, in every corridor, as the mechanical equipment—power conduits, circuitry, energy taps—overheated in rapid expansion, igniting the fuels contained behind the walls. And as the bulkheads shattered, blown outward with fierce concussive power by the waves of heat and energy, they cut through any living tissue standing in the way.

Within instants, the _Enterprise_became a ship of the wounded and dead as hot alloys sliced into soft human bodies, nanoseconds ahead of fires pitched hot enough to immolate human flesh. Screams were snuffed out by the superheated air, the oxygen igniting in pockets of gaseous fire, and visions of the Inferno danced through the ship.

In main engineering—heavily reinforced to guard against just such an event—Trip had to lurch away from his console, his lungs struggling to breathe the scorched air. The coolant conduits running down the length of the warp reactor had ruptured, and Trip watched with silent dismay as the blackened body of an engineer was thrown from the reactor casing clear into the antimatter induction coils.

Summoning his concentration, Trip forced down the waves of bile and ignored the piercing pain stabbing his upper back. He knew without looking that he had been hit with a spray of the lethal coolant, which was starting to inch its way into his skin; within hours, it would corrode his DNA beyond repair, eating through his body like a smorgasbord. It was of no relevance; what was hours away might as well be never.

"Tucker to the bridge!" Trip shouted out, hacking up a black clot that he chose not to analyze. "How soon 'til we're out of the corridor?"

"At current speed, another fifteen minutes or so!" Travis' voice responded.

The answer alarmed Trip more than the black clot, and he switched comm channels. "Impulse control!" he shouted out, hoping his voice would be heard.

"Impulse control here!" The response came from the port monitoring room.

"We need more speed!" Tucker shouted out. "Can you push rocket-2 any further?"

"Give us another three, four minutes!"

"We can't afford three or four minutes!" Trip had to pause to suck in dirtied air. "Listen closely: modulate the pulse on a rotating frequency of…" Figures and numbers darted through his head as he desperately sought an answer. "Try thirty-two-point-six teracycles!"

…

Frustrated by his impotence, Forrest could only watch the battle unfold on the monitoring screen. The subspace vortex had spat out another ship; this one far smaller, different in configuration from the attacking fleet. Presumably, it carried a friend, for the small craft garnered the ire of the warships.

And then, tearing in against the solar plane, came an Andorian ship-of-the-line. It couldn't handle all eleven enemy vessels by itself; but at least it stood a fighting chance.

The eight Starfleet fighters continued to dive and dodge around the enemy fleet, adjusting their tactics to mirror the mosquito assault of old: prick the enemy enough times until a ship broke formation to pursue them. Then the eight fighters could isolate that one ship and—maybe—knock it out of the battle.

But in the heart of the storm, the weapon continued moving, unceasing, towards Earth.

…

"You said there were no other vessels in the vicinity!" Dolim roared, and with a pique of fury, he backhanded the sensor technician across the face, throwing the other reptile from his post. "Much less a ship of war!"

The technician scrambled to his feet. "They weren't here before!" he retorted angrily. "They must have come in at high warp!"

Only a fool—a courageous fool—would travel at high warp within a solar system. Nonetheless, Dolim knew the sensor officer was among the best: and intrastellar warp travel, while dangerous, _could _be done in the hands of a skilled helmsman and the right vessel. But Dolim had seen nothing of these humans that would indicate the needed precision of equipment and skill, and something else seemed out of place…

It clicked in. The newcomer wasn't—couldn't be—a human ship, Dolim reasoned. Its design was fundamentally different from the Earthers, and if the humans _had _such a warship at their disposal, they would have sent _it _into the Expanse, and not the exploration-designed _Enterprise_.

In the end, although, it was a minor development. So what if the humans had better-prepared friends? By the time they arrived, Earth would be shattered rock.

…

Shran's ship shuddered under the impact of reptilian weapons, but the Andorian commander refused to break off his assault. He came in fast, screaming through the gauntlet of warships, taking hits from either side as he ran the length of torpedoes and cannons. Andorians may not be as battle-thirsty as Klingons, but it was not in Shran's blue blood to run from a fight, and fighting in defense of one's friends—there was no higher duty than that of loyalty.

As the Andorian warship absorbed the brunt of weapons fire, trailing right below and slightly behind came Degra's shuttle, hidden in the protective umbra of Shran's vessel. Both ships knew the attack plan. It was brutally simple: get the shuttle within a kilometer of the weapon before the reptilians could destroy it. And that was it.

"That third torpedo almost got you, Archer!" Shran called out. The comm channel had been switched to audio-only, but was still open as the two helmsmen coordinated their approaches. "You should be more careful!" And then, "Adjust your heading, ten degrees port!"

"We're on it, Shran!" Archer responded over the channel. "I just hope you can keep up!"

And the fiery blasts of weapons died off as Shran and Archer pulled within range of the weapon. The reptilian warships dared not fire that close to the weapon; and as their commanders readjusted to find the thread-thin firing paths, Shran's console lit up with a notice: Archer's assault team had transported to the weapon.

_And now the fun begins, _Shran thought to himself. "We're no longer on escort duty, Theris!" The weapons officer twitched her antennae in eager anticipation. "Let's see how many of those bastards we can take out. Lock the forward cannons!"

…

The battle began in earnest around the weapon.

…

"Commander Dolim!" It was a different technician, this one reporting from the internal security monitors. "They transported a boarding party! I have them in—sector twenty-one-beta!"

"Then take a platoon to that sector and destroy them!" Dolim bellowed, displeased with the interruption.

…

As the reptilian warships maneuvered, one found itself in possession of a clear line of fire on Degra's shuttle. The energy beam lanced out, piercing the small craft right through its warp reactor; the magnetic containment fields collapsed, and in a nanosecond, the shuttle blew apart. Thalen didn't even know that they had been hit before he died.

…

The boarding party materialized in a corridor junction near the outer shell of the weapon. It was as Degra's schematics had indicated; no soldiers stood guard, and no automated defense protocols reacted to the arrival of the humans.

Falling into line, with Archer sequestered in the middle, the MACOs began their grueling charge into the interior of the weapon.

…

"Ensign!" Hutchinson shouted without turning his head; given the g-force pressures holding him immobile, it was doubtful that he even could. "Thrust on rocket-2 is firming up! We're regaining speed!"

"Bridge to engineering!" Travis' voice rumbled with the vibrations of the _Enterprise. _"Thrust is coming back! Tell impulse control to keep doing whatever they're doing!"

Trip's rushed voice came back a second later. "Travis, do you have anyone to spare for damage control?!"

"Engineering!" T'Pol's voice plummeted in tenor as it crossed the low-pitched shudders. "Inertial dampeners are failing on G-deck!"

"Shit! We're not reading it down here! How long do we have?"

"Five minutes, Commander! Then the ship is going to shake itself apart!"

Trip mumbled something that was mercifully lost in the intercom.

…

Even in death, Degra continued to help the humans.

His information on the weapon proved to be precisely on point, and his predictions of the reptilians' security protocols were presciently accurate. Keeping their heads low, the assault party made its mad dash down the length of the access corridor, zeroing in on the crucial core of the Xindi weapon. There was resistance; but Degra's files had predicted that Dolim would keep the weapon lightly-manned, and as the team bore down the hallway, enemy fire was sporadic and isolated.

It still took its toll.

With no time for finesse or caution, the MACOs were forced to rely on brute force as they made their way to the interior of the weapon. The reptilian guards, few as they were, had the critical moments to locate shielded points from which to fire; and the MACOs, caught in the open, could only charge forward and attempt to overrun the post before too many of their brethren were hit.

Atrophy was unavoidable, and by the time the assault party reached the main core, they were reduced to seven: Archer, Reed, and five MACO noncoms.

…

At the core of the giant weapon, stretching from terminus to terminus, ran the massive power plant that fueled the planet-killing beam. Ringed by control platforms every five meters or so, one in particular was the object of the humans' pursuit.

At its center, spread in dotted fashion around the core, were a series of lighted tubes, glowing with a violent green energy. They were secondary injectors, and inverting their polarization, a person could trigger a cascade failure in the power core.

Malcolm Reed entered the room first, hitting the deck low and rolling in. A single reptilian technician manned the platform, and he fell instantly, drilled by Malcolm's phase rifle. _They were in._

As the MACOs moved hurriedly to establish a defense perimeter, Archer and Malcolm turned their attention to the injector ring.

"Cue up the inversion sequence!" Archer barked out as he dropped to the deck, slithering his way under the machinery. With only his memory of the schematics to guide him, the captain looked up at the injectors from below and quickly identified his location: he wanted to be a rough half-meter to the right, and he slid over, taking care not to snag his coveralls on a protruding spire.

"I got it, sir!" Malcolm replied momentarily. "The access codes worked! I'm in the system!"

Archer waited, breathing in the putrid air. "Are we ready to go?"

"Just a second, sir—got it! Start with the third injector from the left!"

While the captain had studied the design of the injector ring, committing the inversion sequence to memory, Malcolm carried a padd containing the data as well; both officers knew that they'd only get one shot. Reaching both arms above him, Archer gripped the injector tightly, ignoring the heat that instantly burned his flesh, and as he contorted his body, he turned the injector 180 degrees. The violent green hue faded into orange, and then red, as the injector's polarization was reversed. _One down, _Archer told himself, and tucking his arms by his side, he slid over the next injector.

"The second to the right!" Malcolm called out, confirming the captain's movement. Malcolm heard what sounded like a kick against the deck plating before the second injector turned violet red.

It was a spark of power that had shot through Archer's body like a quick seizure, but the captain only grimaced and shook it off. "Malcolm! One to the left, right?!"

…

Travis gritted his teeth. "How much longer, Hutch?"

The helmsman vibrated as he spoke. "We need another two minutes!"

…

With a small guard complement, it took the reptilians longer to respond; but when Dolim ascertained that the remnants of the assault party were holed up in a single room, he set every spare body he had after them in wave after wave of brute-force assaults, trying to overrun what had to be a rapidly-dwindling number of humans. In a battle of attrition, Dolim knew his forces would ultimately prevail; and in the process…the humans were cornered in an auxiliary control section. How much damage could they do?

The MACOs dug in hard, fighting for every centimeter around the room's entrance. Tactically, they had the advantage; but as energy bolts scorched the air, singeing the very oxygen around them, their breathing became labored as their lungs coped with the vanishing oxygen supply. Acrid smoke clustered around the ceiling, and began to drop into the interior, casting the room in red-and-green hued fog, and the reptilian soldiers pressed forward, using the bodies of their deceased colleagues for protection.

In the smoke, the humans did not know which reptiles were alive, and which were being used as shields; and they had no choice but to pour on more fire, and the reptiles pressed their way into the room.

The five MACOs fell back into hand-to-hand combat, struggling to hold their positions against the onslaught. They had no room to back up, no space to play with; at their backs were the captain and Lieutenant Reed, and the MACOs' mission was to protect their superior officers. At any cost.

As Private Azar drilled one of the oncoming soldiers with pinpoint accuracy, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder from behind, yanking the young private from his cover. Azar didn't even have time to see his attacker in the haze; a sharp pain lanced through his chest, causing white lights to explode before his eyes.

Corporal Kelly was fighting two of the beasts, wielding her phase rifle like a fighting staff. Months of hard training helped her to hold her own, until a third reptile—across the room—planted an energy bolt in her abdomen. She fell to the deck, screaming in pain, before the boot of a beast came down above her eyes.

Captain Archer rejected the feeling of stunned horror. From his vantage point underneath the injector ring, he had just seen Malcolm Reed crash to the deck, the lieutenant's face a mashed casserole of scorched-black skin and pale white fragments of bone.

"We got 'em, Captain!" The voice was Private Walker's. "We beat back the wave, but it looks like another one is coming!"

…

"_How much longer?"_ Travis could barely hear his own voice over the roar of the starship as the stem bolts began to shake loose.

"_We need another minute_!" Hutchinson shouted in response.

"_We need to get out of this corridor, Hutch! Can you get any more speed?"_

_"Perhaps a little—but I don't know what damage it will cause!"_

_"Do it, damnit!"_

"Ensign!" T'Pol's refined voice was scarcely quieter. "Our time is up!"

_"Now, Mr. Hutchinson!"_

With a shudder of explosion, the skeletal remains of the _Enterprise_slid out of the vortex in a fish-tailing skid, coming to a dead stop in space.

As the racket diminished, Travis thought he heard a new sound: the cracking of support beams from overhead. He looked up, to the blue dome above him, and saw the movement; pushing off, he dove from the command chair and skidded across the debris-strewn deck as the dome crashed down, showering the bridge with slivers of transparent aluminum.

Travis gulped for air, coughing as he sucked in dust and dirt. "Ship's status?" he called out, moving right back to work.

…

"Admiral!" The Operations officer didn't cloak his alarm. "There's another ship coming out of the subspace distortion, sir!"

"Put it on screen!" Forrest barked, and he watched as one panel of the monitor flickered to show a far-distant view of the newcomer. "Can you get better resolution?"

"Just a moment, sir!" The officer manipulated his controls—connected to an imaging satellite in high-Earth orbit—and the view zoomed in quickly, revealing a puzzle. It looked like—_junkyard debris, _Forrest realized. _What the hell is that?_

"Admiral, we're picking up a Starfleet transponder signature!" The comment caused Forrest to whip his head about in surprise; the newcomer looked nothing like a Starfleet ship, and the only one unaccounted for was…the…_Enterprise?_

"Identify it, Lieutenant!" Forrest barked.

The response confirmed his improbable suspicions. "It's the _U.S.S. Enterprise, _Admiral!"

_How is that possible? _Forrest thought as he studied the image. It was nothing more than a jumbled array of support beams, the mangled remnants of a ship; this craft on the monitor was not remotely space-worthy. Besides, it had _no _warp nacelles! Instead, it was venting angry, red gases into space. _Nothing can even be alive on there,_ Forrest told himself with astonishment.

…

Captain Archer ran through the sequence in his head as he rolled to the next injector. _Number four—four to the left, _he told himself, and repeated it in confirmation as he rolled into place. Looking up at the machinery, he gritted his teeth again—his hands were burned beyond recognition, but he had no choice—and slowly twisted the injector to the left. He was rewarded by the color change to violet.

_What's next? _Archer pushed down a surge of panic as he ran through the cycle again in his head. _Four to the left, then one to the right._ He could smell the acrid stench of his own burning flesh, but forced himself to ignore it; for a random moment, he wished he was Vulcan, envying their mental control over pain. In position, he reached up again, twisting the next injector.

_Number six—the final one, _he realized. _We're actually going to do this. We're actually going to do this!_ The captain would never have revealed his doubts to his crew, but the odds had been so long against success that Archer had envisioned that they would simply go out in a blaze of glory, but only one injector was left. _Don't get ahead of yourself, Jonathan. Focus on—the—task—at—hand! _Archer yanked his charred hands back after twisting the injector, and rolled out from underneath the assembly.

"Captain!" Cole, Richards, and Ryan were alive, although Richards stood on one foot; scrambling to his own feet, Archer stepped over Malcolm's corpse, grimly forcing himself to treat it as part of the background. "What's next, sir?" Cole asked. She didn't look at the captain; her gaze, along with the emitter of her phase rifle, was pinned on the doorway.

"The inversion sequence has been activated," Archer replied, hearing a strange whistling sound as he spoke. A quick inventory of his mouth revealed several missing teeth. _I wonder when that happened?_ "We have to hold this room until the overload initiates."

"Can you grab a rifle, Captain?" Ryan asked tersely. He, too, was watching the doorway. "I think the next wave has arrived."

…

"The Xindi weapon is nearing Earth orbit!"

Travis scrambled to his feet and ran back to tactical, where he studied the display over Ensign Rahimi's shoulder. "How far?" he demanded.

Rahimi, uncertain of the question, gave both answers. "We're fifty million kilometers away, sir. The weapon is—" the sensors failed to provide an answer. "It looks like roughly five minutes from firing range."

The tactical schematics showed the battle unfolding scarce distance from Earth's orbit. In the center—moving forward slowly, but without pause—was the great weapon that would soon rip the planet Earth apart at its core. Around the weapon, the reptilian fleet—Travis counted seven ships; he knew that eleven had exited the corridor, so presumably the damaged sensors were unable to detect the debris of the other four—danced around the weapon in a tightly-choreographed set of battle maneuvers, holding off the attackers.

…

Admiral Forrest ignored the stab of pain that erupted in his abdomen. He had fought with ulcers for many years; doctor after doctor had told him to reduce his stress, but in the face of annihilation, ulcers seemed so…inconsequential.

Instead, the admiral was reduced to watching the battle, unable to reach out with any weapons of his own. And as the Xindi fleet neared Earth, the comm traffic between Starfleet's remaining fighters and Commander Shran's ship became more and more frantic as they failed to pierce the veil of warship to get to the weapon itself.

Absurdly, as he watched the death of humanity unfold, Forrest had no final thoughts.

…

Travis ran the math through his head. _Fifty million kilometers is…just under three light-minutes. Top impulse is one-third light-speed, which gives us a transit time of…roughly eight and a half minutes. The Xindi weapon is roughly five minutes from firing range. _The sums did not add up, but he would push the _Enterprise_to do whatever it could.

"Hutch! Set a course, and take us in at top impulse!" Travis barked out the order as he jogged across to the comm station. The last, violent quaking had knocked Sorenson from her chair, and she lay on the deck, unmoving. With forced callousness, Travis pushed her aside and took the seat, re-opening a channel to engineering.

…

The second wave of reptiles was heavier than the first, and the human commandos had lost strength. Richards fell quickly; already bearing serious injury, he was unable to evade the weapons blasts that poured through the entryway, and a barrage of energy coalesced on him, managing to set his fire-retardant battledress on fire. Three of them remained—Cole, Ryan, and Archer. They had to hold on long enough.

…

Slowly, the battle turned in favor of the reptilian fleet. In turn, four of the Starfleet fighters rapidly immolated themselves, and as the reptile commanders turned their numerical advantage against the others, Commander Shran's ship peeled away from combat, mortally stricken. Several escape pods managed to eject before the warship disappeared in the brightness of a warp core explosion.

…

Commander Tucker could only brace himself as the _Enterprise_resumed its violent quaking as it shot up to maximum impulse. The inertial dampeners and the structural integrity fields were failing across the ship; Trip knew that the _Enterprise_was shedding entire chunks of its superstructure as it rocketed towards Earth.

The engineering bay had become a burning madhouse. The flames overrode even the screaming alarms, silencing them in the crackling hiss of plasma fires, and Trip felt himself stagger as he inhaled smoke. Gritting his teeth, he clung to consciousness, shaking off a wave of vertigo.

Another explosion—this one from the antimatter injectors—infused main engineering with a billowing cloud of thick, black smog, and staggering through it, Trip saw an engineer drop to the deck, covered his angry flames. As another technician moved to assist their burning comrade, Trip used his good arm to grab the newcomer and shove him back to his monitoring station. "_Stand your post!"_ Trip roared harshly, his voice ripping through the screams. "_All of you: stand your posts!"_

…

"_How much longer?" _Travis screamed across the bridge, hoping that T'Pol's sensitive hearing would detect his words; otherwise, over the noise of the great starship shaking itself apart, there was little hope of being heard.

_"We have another six minutes!_" T'Pol shouted in response, her Vulcan decorum slipping beneath the frenetic volume of her voice. "_The weapon will arrive in four-point-five!"_

She said something else, but it was lost beneath the concussive force of another explosion. The tactical station completely disappeared beneath the wave of white-hot heat and fire, and Travis knew without guessing that Rahimi was gone.

He pounded the comm panel. "_Engineering!"_

…

_"Tucker here!"_ Trip grabbed a support rail by the closest comm panel, and grimaced as his fractured left arm collided with a bulkhead.

_"We need more speed, Commander!"_ Trip could barely hear Travis, but as the commander glanced around at the wreckage, he knew his answer.

_"I can't give you anything more, Travis!" _Trip shouted back in reply. _"I don't even know how we're sustaining what we have!"_

…

In the smog-filled haze of the control platform, the burning beams of energy died off, leaving Archer to stumble forward in awe and dismay. The reptilian soldiers had ceased their barrage of fire; in Archer's mind, there were several possibilities, but only one was strong: the reptiles sensed that they had been victorious.

From behind the injector assembly, Archer moved forward slowly, almost swimming through the thick, red-hued smoke. He felt, rather than saw, a body nearby, and recognized that it was Corporal Cole. Her body was charred and blackened.

Slowly recognizing that he was in the advanced stages of severe shock, Archer glanced down at his own body, and it was testament to his own mental condition that the sight did not move him: he had a grotesque injury on his left thigh, mangled flesh and scorched muscle, pouring out a river of blood. _That's it, _he thought clinically. _Shock from severe blood loss. Left untreated, I will die in…_he tripped, but his body was held up by the injector assembly. Under his feet was the lower torso of Ryan.

…

Travis saw space in his head.

Earth, the weapon, the reptilian fleet, the _Enterprise…_they all arranged themselves, showing their relative positions, vectors, and speeds, and it was more with instinct than mathematical precision that Travis found an option.

If they could increase the impulse thrust to zero-point-four light-speed, they _might _catch the weapon.

"_Commander!"_ Travis barked over the intercom. _"If you overload the impulse reactions, can we get up to point-four?"_

There was a short pause before the response came back. _"I suppose so, but it would blow up the ship in the process!"_

_"But wouldn't there be a time delay while the reaction built?"_ Travis shouted, seizing upon the idea.

_"Yeah, maybe twenty-five seconds or so, but then we'd be done for!"_

_"T'Pol?" _Travis turned towards the Vulcan.

She caught on instantly. "We'd catch up with the weapon in twenty seconds!"

_"Hear that, Commander?" _Travis screamed, and the response was swift.

_"I got what you're saying, Ensign, but the ship would blow up before we could do anything!"_

Travis knew what he had to do. "_We need the speed, Commander! Overload the reactors!"_

…

"You must be a fool, human!" Dolim snarled from the doorway. Archer heard the reptilian before he saw the reptile's massive body step forward. "It's the only explanation I can find! You had the chance to run and hide—save what little portion of your meager race that you could—and yet you returned, delivering yourself into the jaws of death! Only a fool, Captain, only a fool!"

Archer groaned as he tried to pull himself to his full height. His body tilted to the left, unable to straighten further against the force of a crippling internal injury. Ribs, lungs, kidneys…whatever it was didn't really matter.

As the captain dragged himself forward, the form of the reptile gradually emerged through the smoke. "It's over, Captain! You are dead, your ship and crew are dead, your planet and race are dead! What good does it do you to deny that? What good does it do you to continue to fight?"

Archer visualized a chronometer, mentally watching the countdown. He had to hang on, crucial seconds later, to prevent Dolim from stopping the inversion overload. Once it began, it would power down the entire weapon, and even a minor blow from the outside would destroy the deathbringer.

"There's no one left to stop us, Archer!" Dolim roared, stepping towards the captain.

Contorted with pain, Archer finally stood up straight. "There's no one left…except me," he replied softly.

…

Admiral Forrest watched in astonishment as the pile of debris named the _Enterprise_tore through space. Raw plasma exhaust vented in its wake, giving the ship a demonic glow as it rocketed closer and closer, screaming with the fury of a hundred banshees as it closed in on the weapon.

…

Travis, with nothing left to do, watched as the Xindi weapon grew before them. The _Enterprise_had seconds left to live; it had no operational weapons; there was one option left.

…

Archer smiled grimly as his mental clock passed zero.

…

"_Bring us at intercept, helm!"_ Travis barked out as the kilometers vanished. _"Hold your course steady!"_

…

Like a missile, the tattered remains of the _Enterprise, _trailed by red fire, sliced into the unprotected side of the Xindi weapon. Alloy crashed into alloy; duranium frames collided, bending and rupturing the shapes of both vessels, and the careening pieces of the Earth ship plowed through the delicate construction of the Xindi weapon, ripping it to shreds as they passed.

Deep in the rear of the stardrive section, the violent jolts tore apart what remained of the impulse reactors, and four suns exploded as the fusion reactors lost control. Within nanoseconds, the atomic explosions triggered the far more volatile fuel of the warp core, and in a thunderous explosion, the weapon, the _Enterprise_ exploded, the matter-antimatter reaction consuming the reptilian fleet and any debris that remained.

…

As the fireball cleared, Admiral Forrest waited in vain for any sign of life to emerge.


End file.
